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Goals: Meal Planning (part 1)

In my last post, I had talked about goals vs. resolutions. At the end of the post, I’ve mentioned that I seemed to have lost a size. However, not planning my meals had made it difficult. On the days that I’m tired or I’ve had a rough morning, it’s so much easier to just boil some pasta or eat some random item in the fridge. So now, starting next week, I will be planning my meals.

Breakfast and dinner may be a little more random, and I will just plan lunches. As it turns out, since Mike goes to bed at 3:00pm, our biggest meal is lunch and I usually make a very light dinner for the kids and myself. Perhaps after getting into a routine of making meals as planned, I will also work on breakfast and dinner.

To make things a little more efficient, I will only plan six meals, one for each day, and each day will have an assigned meal, except one. For example, for every Monday will be “meal x” and every Tuesday will be “meal y” and so on. Saturday would be a good day to have the experimental day, where I try a new meal on the kids. If they really like it, then I can use it to replace a meal that the kids are getting bored of or aren’t too crazy about.

Sunday, we usually eat somewhere else, so I have designated Sundays to be a day off from the stricter diet, but I will still have to avoid any food that triggers my allergies. On the rare occasion that we don’t eat at my parent’s house or at church, I’ll just have to scratch something up. Maybe I’ll consider precooking some meals and putting them into the freezer for those days.

With all that said, now I have to figure out what to make. I bet there are thousands of recipe sites to choose from and on each site, thousands of recipes.

Here’s one site that seems interesting, especially since I have decided to lean towards more of a paleo diet as I can no longer eat gluten and I have cut back on sugar. Thefoodie.com is a community-based site in where the members add their recipes. The best part is that you can make your shopping list by adding recipes to a “shopping cart”. So, after you have planned for a week, you can print out a list of what you will need.

The food listed looks really, really good. Perhaps I should have waited until I’ve had something to eat before looking at this site. I’ve already added quite a few recipes to my favorites.